In The Dybbuk, a drama of mystical passion and demonic possession, S. Ansky (1863-1920) brings together the saga of his own youthful rebellion against religious authority, his abiding faith in the power of the simple folk, his utopian struggle for equality, and his newfound commitment to the Jewish people. Anksy had just returned from an epoch-making ethnographic expedition through the Yiddish heartland of Eastern Europe, and what he found in the towns and townlets of the Ukraine was a religious civilization that mediated the living and the dead, the strong and the weak, the natural and the supernatural.
In his introduction to this volume, David G. Roskies reveals that Ansky's return to Mother Russia was accompanied by a profound renegotiation with his hasidic heritage, the Yiddish language, and the Jewish historical imagination. The book also contains little-known works of autobiographical and fantastical prose fiction, as well as an excerpt from The Destruction of Galacia, Ansky's four-volume chronicle of the Eastern Front in the First World War.
